ClubMahindra membership sale post triggers copycats

Most of you are aware that we (myself and Bhupesh) had created a page wherein people can buy/sell used club mahindra membership for free. This idea has been tremendously successful and we’ve got more than 400 entries with people listing their memberships for sale or expressing interest to buy. Business close to 30 lakhs has been facilitated by this blog so far [details].

Now, the other side of being popular is that many people find it easier to copy it. Everyone from small time individuals like me to multi billion giants like Microsoft are vulnerable to IPR violations. Seeing the success of our page, many individuals have started duplicating the idea, even copying the content from my blog post word to word and stealing user data from displayed spreadsheet and replicating everything on their blog/websites built on free sub domains.

Two such examples are http://www.clubmahindramembership.co.cc and http://gofornautral.blogspot.com, (If you wish to visit pls copy paste the URL in another window/tab and explore. You can verify that it is a clear duplication of my Buy/Sell club Mahindra membership post. If you’re convinced that it is an IPR violation, please click on report abuse and select Copyright infringement as Type of abuse. Thanks for your support). We can also report abuse at .co.cc (hosting site that where the free subdomain is created), selecting type of abuse as phishing. Reporting abuse may not help much as they can create another copy, but it will send out signal that we’re watching
(Update: the first site seems to be shutdown and subdomain is up for grabs-most probably taken down by .co.cc after phishing complaints)

Both sites seems to be manned by same person who's identity is not available anywhere (obviously). Also they’ve made an attempt to make money through it, charging $20 from those looking to sell their memberships. Another major mistake is trying to steal Club Mahindra’s identity, by keeping an URL and banner which are chosen to mislead visitors into believing that they are genuine Club Mahindra group websites. (this qualifies as phishing)

Now this has forced me to identify ways to protect my IPR and more importantly to prevent misuse of information provided by users, who’ve entered their data in the spreadsheet I’d created. One major way to do this was to hide the email IDs of buyers and sellers and giving a provision wherein visitor can send an email by entering text in a form (the data will then be mailed to recipient,whose email ID won’t be revealed to prospects). Thanks to Bhupesh for this idea. Since Google Docs doesn’t have this provision, we’re working on moving the spreadsheet to Zoho.

There’s been some compromise of email IDs which users had chosen to display in the spreadsheet soliciting inquiries for buying or selling a timeshare membership. Other than that, the threat seems to be minimal, as these new sites do not have any search engine presence. I’ve temporarily taken down the spreadsheet displayed in buy/sell page and will make it live once it is migrated to Zoho. Regrets for the inconvenience.

Internet being free for all, its challenging to prevent someone from copying your text. Your thoughts on how duplication of this kind can be prevented, and how the spreadsheets and Google doc forms can be made more secure are welcome.

Similar: Times of India publishes my image without credit (and issues a clarification later)